Friedrich Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy (Chap. 16) lyrics

By setting out this historical example, we have attempted to clarify how tragedy just as surely dies away with the disappearance of the spirit of music, as it can be born only out of this spirit. To mitigate the strangeness of this claim and, on the other hand, to indicate the origin of this insight of ours, we must now openly face up to an*logous phenomena of the present time. We must stride right into the midst of those battles which, as I have just said, are being waged in the loftiest spheres of our present world between the insatiably optimistic desire to know and the tragic need for art. In this discussion, I shall omit all the other opposing drives which have in every age worked against art, especially against tragedy, and which at present have also taken hold with such confidence of victory that, for example, in the art of the theatre, only farces and ballets produce fragrant blossoms with a reasonably luxurious bloom, which is perhaps not for everyone. I shall speak only of the most illustrious opposition to the tragic world view: by that I mean scientific knowledge, optimistic to the deepest core of its being, with its father Socrates at the very pinnacle. Shortly I shall also indicate by name the forces which seem to me to guarantee a rebirth of tragedy — and who knows what other blessed hopes for the German character! Before we leap into the middle of that battle, let us wrap ourselves in the armour of the insights we seized upon earlier. In opposition to all those eager to derive art from a single principle as the necessary living origin of every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed on both those artistic divinities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognize in them the living and clear representatives of two art worlds, different in their deepest being and their highest goals. Apollo stands before me as the transfigured genius of the principium individuationis [principle of individuation] , through which release is only to be truly attained through illusion; whereas, under the mystical joyous cries of Dionysus, the spell of individuation is shattered, and the way lies open to the maternal source of being, to the innermost core of things. This tremendous difference, which opens up a yawning gap between plastic art as the Apollonian and music as the Dionysian art, became obvious to only one of the great thinkers, to the extent that he, even without that prompting from the symbolism of the Greek gods, recognized for music a character and origin different from all the other arts, because music is not, like all those others, the image of appearance, but an immediate portrayal of the will itself and also because it presents the metaphysical as compared to all physical things in the world, the thing-in-itself as compared to all appearances (Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, I.1.3.52). On this most significant insight into all aesthetics, which, taken seriously, marks the first beginning of aesthetics, Richard Wagner, as confirmation of its lasting truth, set his stamp, when he established in Beethoven that music must be a**essed on aesthetic principles entirely different from those for all fine arts and not at all according to the category of beauty, although an erroneous aesthetics in the service of a misleading and degenerate art, had, because of that idea of beauty a**erting itself in the world of images, become accustomed to demand from music an effect similar to what it demanded from works of the plastic arts, namely, the arousal of satisfaction in beautiful forms. After the discovery of that tremendous opposition, I sensed a strong urge to bring myself closer to the essence of Greek tragedy and, in so doing, to the most profound revelation of the Hellenic genius. Only now did I believe I was capable of the magical task of posing the basic problem of tragedy vividly in my own mind, over and above the jargon of our customary aesthetics. Through that, I was granted such a strange, idiosyncratic glimpse into the Hellenic that it had to appear to me as if our cla**ical-Hellenic scholarship, which behaves so proudly, had up to this point known, for the most part, only how to gloat over games with shadows and trivialities. Perhaps we can touch on that original problem with the following question: What aesthetic effect arises when those inherently separate powers of art, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, come to operate alongside each other? Or, put more briefly, what is the relationship of music to images and ideas? Schopenhauer, whom Richard Wagner applauded on this very point for the unsurpa**able clarity and perceptiveness of his explanation, spoke his views on this matter in the greatest detail in the following place, which I will quote again here in full, from World as Will and Idea, I, p. 309: “As a result of all this, we can look upon the world of appearance, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing, which itself is thus the only mediating factor in the an*logy between the two of them; thus, an insight into this mediating factor is required in order to understand that an*logy. According to this, music, when considered as an expression of the world, is to the highest degree a universal language, something which even has a relationship with the universality of ideas, rather like the way these are related to particular things. Its universality, however, is in no way that empty universality of abstractions, but something of an entirely different kind, bound up with a thoroughly clear certainty. In this, music is like geometric figures and numbers, which are the universal forms of all possible objects of experience and applicable to them all a priori [before experience] , not, however, in an abstract manner but vividly and thoroughly fixed. All possible efforts, excitements, and expressions of the will, all those processes inside human beings, which reason subsumes under the broad negative concept of feelings, can be expressed through the infinite number of possible melodies, but always in the universality of mere form, without matter, always only according to the thing-in-itself, not according to its appearance; they are, so to speak, its innermost soul, without the body. From this intimate relationship which music has with the true essence of all things, we can also account for the fact that when an appropriate music is heard in any scene, business, action, or environment, this music appears to open up to us the most secret sense of these things and comes forward as the most correct and clearest commentary on them, in the same way that for the man who surrenders himself entirely to the experience of a symphony it is as if he saw all possible events of life and of the world drawn over into himself, and yet he cannot, if he thinks about it, perceive any similarity between that play of sounds and the things which are in his mind. For music is, as mentioned, different from all other arts in this sense: it is not a portrayal of appearances, or more correctly, the adequate objectification of the will, but the immediate portrayal of the will itself, as well as the metaphysical complement of all physical things in the world and the thing-in-itself of all appearances. We could, therefore, call the world the embodiment of music just as much as the embodiment of the will. And that is why it is understandable that music is capable of bringing out every painting, indeed, every scene of real life and the world, with an immediate and higher significance and, of course, to do that all the more, the closer the an*logy of its melody is to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon. On this point we base the fact that we can set a poem to music as a song, or a vivid presentation as a pantomime, or both as an opera. Such individual pictures of human life, given a foundation in the universal language of music, are never bound to music and do not correspond with music by some constant necessity, but stand in relation to music as a random example to a universal idea. They present in the clarity of the real the very thing which music expresses in the universality of mere form. For melodies are, to a certain extent, like general ideas, an abstractum [abstraction] from the reality. For reality, that is, the world of individual things, supplies clear phenomena, remarkable and individual things, the single case, to both the universality of ideas and to the universality of melodies. Both of these universals, however, are, from a certain point of view, contrary to each other, since ideas consist only of forms abstracted first of all from perception, the stripped-away outer skin of things, so to speak, and are thus really and entirely abstracta [abstractions] ; music, by contrast, gives the heart of the thing, the innermost core, which comes before all particular forms. This relationship can be really well expressed in the language of the scholastics, when we say: ideas are the universalia post rem [universals after the fact] ; music, however, gives the universalia ante rem [universals before the fact] , and reality the universalia in re [universals in the fact] . That in general there can be a connection between a musical composition and a perceptible presentation, however, rests on the point that, as stated, both are only very different expressions of same inner essence of the world. Now, when in a particular case such a connection is truly present, that is, the composer has known how to express in the universal language of music the dynamic of the will, which constitutes the core of an event, then the melody of the song, the music of the opera, is full of expression. But the an*logy discovered by the composer between those two must issue from his immediate insight into the world's essence, unknown to his reason, and must not be an imitation, conveyed in ideas with conscious intentionality. Otherwise the music does not express the inner essence, the will itself, but only gives an inadequate imitation of its appearance, the way all essentially imitative music does.” Following what Schopenhauer has taught, we also understand music as the language of the unmediated will and feel our imaginations stirred to shape that spirit world which speaks to us invisibly and nonetheless with such vital movement and to embody it for ourselves in an an*logous illustration. By contrast, image and idea, under the influence of a truly appropriate music, reach an elevated significance. Thus, Dionysian art customarily works in two ways on Apollonian artistic potential: music stimulates us to the metaphorical viewing of the Dionysian universality, and music then permits that metaphorical image to come forward with the highest significance. From this inherently intelligible observation and without any deeper considerations of unapproachable things, I conclude that music is capable of generating myth, that is, the most meaningful example, and of giving birth in particular to the tragic myth, the myth which speaks in metaphors of the Dionysian insight. I have explained in the phenomenon of the lyric poet, how the music in the lyric poet strives to make its essence known through him in Apollonian pictures. If we now imagine that music at its highest intensity must also seek to reach its highest representation, then we must consider it possible that music also knows how to find the symbolic expression for its essentially Dionysian wisdom. And where else will we have to look for this expression, if not in tragedy and in the idea of the tragic generally? From the essence of art as it is commonly understood according to the single categories of illusion and beauty, it is genuinely impossible to derive the tragic. Only with reference to the spirit of music do we understand a joy in the destruction of the individual. For in particular examples of such a destruction is made clear to us the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art, which brings into expression the will in its omnipotence out from behind, so to speak, the principio individuationis [principle of individuation] , the eternal life beyond all appearances and in spite of all destruction. The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctive unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of the image: the hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is destroyed, and we are happy at that, because, after all, he is only an illusion, and the eternal life of the will is not disturbed by his destruction. “We believe in eternal life,” so tragedy calls out, while the music is the direct idea of this life. The work of the plastic artist has an entirely different purpose: here Apollo overcomes the suffering of the individual through the bright exaltation in the eternity of the illusion. Here beauty is victorious over the suffering inherent in life. The pain is, in a certain sense, brushed away from the face of nature. In Dionysian art and in its tragic symbolism this same nature speaks to us with its true, undisguised voice: “Be as I am! Under the incessant changes in phenomena, the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally forcing things into existence, eternally satisfied with the changing nature of appearances!”